Search Blog

Think different

Whether you’re on the love side or on the hate side towards Apple, and also if you don’t care, there’s a lot all project teams can learn from them. A couple of quite important things… the boys and girls from Cupertino simply got them right. In Steve Job’s biography -which now seems to sell almost as well as the Iphone itself- most of these important things can be found. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Customer value first

Long before it became fashionable –and necessary for corporations- to really care about the customer, Apple has been putting the customer first. Users of the original Macintosh computer were easily found boasting that their machines were visual and intuitive, easy to use thanks to the mouse, graphic interface, plug and play functionality, and that, last but not least, they were pleasant to look at -thanks to attention for design-. Meanwhile their colleagues using computers with MS DOS, would have to spend hours reading manuals and staring at a black screen with a green ‘prompt’ (What’s a prompt anyway?), before even starting to do something. Most customers are not nerds, we don’t care about technique or functionality, we simply want to do the things we have to do, easily, intuitively, without hassle.

Lean and Agile Project Teams like to put the customer first too, and in doing so, they model what Steve Jobs would be doing all the time: Asking about ‘User Stories’, simple little phrases specifying the user, their specific goal and their reason for having that goal. That way we learn to focus on our customers, rather than on our own often nerdy obsessions and priorities.

It ain’t ready before it’s ready

Apple products are also known for being fully finished. Whether you like that or not, everything has been taken care of. The product is not only a machine, a tool, it also comes with a neat power supply and a designed packaging box. When you take the machine out, it plays, you can immediately start using it, because it features bug free software. In Jobs’ biography, it’s recalled several times that product launches had to be tremendously delayed due to a seemingly unimportant looking incompleteness. In Lean and Agile Project Management, we say that the team should focus on delivering a full User Story during each Iteration. As long as it has not been completely finished, we can’t tick off the Story. There’s a lot more to say about this habit, but it may be the true meaning of First Time Right. The Project Team delivers a fully finished product. It’s all done, no more rework to be done.

Always be prepared to change scope and priorities

In the accounts on the concept development of the Apple Stores, it’s recalled how after almost a year working and shortly before the grand opening of the first store, Ron Johnson, the project leader, wakes up in the middle of the night ‘with a painful thought: They had gotten something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the store around each of Apple’s main product lines, with areas for the iMac, iBook, PowerMac and PowerBook… Johnson’s predawn brainstorm was that the stores should organize displays not just around the company’s four lines of computers, but also around things people might want to do. “For example, I thought there should be a movie bay, wehere we’d have various Macs and PowerBooks running iMovie and showing how you can import from your video camera and edit.”

This changes everything for the layout of the stores, Steve Jobs knows it’s true and has the team making the change. It’s a good lesson for all project teams: One should always be prepared to change the course of a product when the project demands so. In Lean and Agile Project Management we allow the customer to make changes and adjustments to the priorities for every priority, since not everything can be known and knowledge increases on the road.

Integrated product teams

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, after his time at Next and Pixar, he reportedly found an organization running many different products and services, organized in a traditional, functional way. He almost immediately decided to simplify this and instead to keep 4 integrated product families:

Consumer

Pro

Laptop

iBook

PowerBook

Desktop

iMac

PowerMac

These product families were all to be responsible for everything involved. So all blaming of others could stop and every one started being accountable for their own results. One of the most fundamental things we (try to) do in Lean and Agile Project Management is this: We make teams responsible for the results of only one project, and with that, also fully accountable. Lean and Agile Project Teams together are responsible for their success, or failure. They can count on all the skills for delivering what they need to deliver, all team members are fully dedicated and no one spares time on other projects –or product families-, until the project has been completed. And that really works.

Waypoint is project management software to support the execution of Lean and Agile projects, in software development, new product development, construction, Waypoint is software to support lean project leaders and teams. The software allows to budget, plan, report, standardize and improve project execution, along the principles of Lean Project Management and Agile Programming and Planning. Waypoint is offered by Heyunka, a provider of on-line tools for the implementation of lean management and agile development.Heyunka's tools are web-based and require standard compliant browser. Clients are charged only for actual usage -from one to as many users as you like and for as long as you need it. Tools are sold on-line. No IT needed.